Derek put his arm around her and held her tight. The two of them had had a long week to reacclimate and talk out everything that had happened. It looked like they were going to survive the experience.
"So do you still feel the weight of the old family curse?" he asked, without a hint of humor or judgment in his voice.
ButJordin grinned. "It wasn't there. There was no blemish or mark on my soul. It was never there. It was clean. I should have known it would be. That's the promise after all-but I didn't have faith. I know now how short life is in this world regardless of when we leave it, and I'm not going to spend what little time we have here living in fear."
I liked that answer. I also wondered how much of it she had heard from Derek and had adopted and repeated as her own.
It didn't matter. I could tell she believed it.
"You know," Pierre chimed in with a bit of a flourish, "as long as we're tying up loose ends ... There's a question I still haven't gotten an answer to. And this question is for you, Ms. Peters."
I smiled sheepishly at his cheeky use of my last name. "Yes?" I said in faux sincerity.
"What happens when we die?" he asked.
I couldn't stop myself from glancing across the table at Jordin, recalling our first meeting and how I had demanded that she come up with that very question on her own, before I would agree to help her. We exchanged a brief glance. Even Derek looked my way for a moment before smiling warmly at his fiancee.
After all we had been through, after actually entering the spirit world and experiencing the freedom of not being constrained by a feeble, flawed human body ... After everything that had happened, I finally understood.
I turned back to Pierre. "It's the wrong question," I said. "I've been asking it myself for so long ... but it was always the wrong question to be asking."
Derek and Jordin watched me with keen eyes as Pierre spoke again. "Then what's the right question?"
"The right question, Mr. Ravenwood," I replied, mimicking his use of my last name, "is `What happens when we live?"
Do I believe in ghosts? I imagine this is the question I will be asked more than any other once Nightmare is consumed by readers.
It's a provocative question, one that captures some part of childlike imagination in all of us, because regardless of whether ghosts exist or not, the question speaks to a world beyond the one we know, and a life beyond the one we live today.
These are the facts: the kinds of events depicted in this book happen. They don't happen to everyone, and they don't happen every day, but they happen. The paranormal, ghosts, apparitions, whatever you want to call it: they're real. They exist. But what they are exactly is open to debate. Or to science, should it ever find a way to explain it to us.
I believe that there are all manner of supernatural things happening in the spiritual realm at all times. And I believe that the spirit realm exists parallel to the mortal world we live in, and the two overlap in ways we can't and won't fully understand until our time here is over.
Disembodied souls wandering the earth have been reported almost since the dawn of time, and the majority of people alive today either claim to have encountered a ghost or at the very least believe in them.
But ... do I believe in ghosts?
I'll give you this much: I've never seen a ghost in person (and frankly, I'm not sure I'd ever want to). And though I keep an open mind when it comes to the paranormal, my view of the world tends to look a lot like Derek's.
But there's enough legitimate evidence for the reality of the paranormal that I can accept that something really is happening in many haunting cases. And as Maia points out in the book, I'm not at all convinced that that "something" can always be chalked up to demons. Having reviewed thousands of reported hauntings in preparation for this book, even if only a fraction of them are legit, there's still way too much evidence for them to simply be dismissed.
I wrote this book as a way of challenging you to make your own conclusions, and I hope you will do just that.
In no way should this story be considered an endorsement of taking part in the field of paranormal investigation. The story depicted herein is just that: a story. It's not meant to be absorbed as anything but fodder for contemplation, conversation, and entertainment.
While I'm fascinated by the work of paranormal investigators, it cannot be overstressed that touching the paranormal is inherently dangerous. I would no more recommend it than I would recommend swimming with sharks or sword swallowing. There may be people in the world who can do it safely, but that doesn't make it a smart idea.
Every location visited by Maia and Jordin in this book is real. These locations exist exactly as they are described here, and each one of them has had countless reports of paranormal activity, and continue to. Nearly all of them are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Though dramatic license has been taken in the number and frequency of paranormal events that occurs at each one of these places in the book, every instance of paranormal activity depicted herein is based on events that have really happened at one haunted location or another, all of which have been verified by recordings and/or multiple eye-witness accounts.
It should come as no surprise that the fire that burns the abandoned Mount Hope Methodist Episcopal Church to the ground, as depicted in chapter 16, is a bit of fiction on my part; at the time of this writing, the church has never caught fire and still stands (though just barely) within the very dead woods that surround it, where no plant life of any kind has grown for decades.
To my family, most especially my wonderful Karen and my adorable little Evan and Emma: I love you more than you will ever know. Thanks for letting me be a dreamer, and for dreaming with me.
To my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ: You are mighty to save, and always faithful and true.
To you, dear reader: Thanks for taking this ride with me. Let's take another one soon.
PHOTO CREDITS
My deepest thanks to the talented photographers who are responsible for the incredible photos of the real-world locations seen in this book (with the exception of the Devil's Den photo in Chapter 20, which is credited to yours truly).
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